Many electronic components such as integrated circuits, transistors, rectifiers and the like can generate large amounts of heat. In many products it is common to attach the electronic component to a "finned" heat sink which conducts heat away from the electronic component package and transfers the heat to the ambient air. Smaller heat sinks may be directly attached to the electronic component. These small heat sinks are supported by the electronic package. Larger heat sinks are usually mechanically mounted to the printed circuit board and the electronic component is mounted to the heat sink with a screw or the like.
Conventional heat sink assemblies suffer from several defects. Typically the location of the electrical component on the sink is fixed by a screw hole and the location of the sink on the printed circuit board is fixed by a screw hole as well. As a consequence, tolerance stacking between these various elements makes it difficult to achieve rapid automated mounting and assembly of the electronic component and the heat sink assembly. Although screw attachment can generate high clamping forces in excess of 100 lbs force, they are easily stripped if they are over torqued. Also each heat sink is generally specially made for the particular application which increases the cost of the heat sink assembly.